Africa road trip: Day Zero

Adventures in User Experience. Rural Africa.

Mar 30, 2014

Haller Trip Kit List

This coming Tuesday Red Badger and Haller will be meeting in Africa to begin their 2 week research trip in Kenya.

In a collaboration between Pearlfisher, Red Badger and Haller, a web app has been created to supplement and augment Haller's already thriving farmer education program based at their farming training centre in Mombasa. We'll be going out to present it to the farmers and witness first hand how it is received and get their feedback on the work we have done so far.

Week One

We will be focussing on speaking to established farmers of coffee and tea plantations. By holding focus group sessions and creative workshops with the farmers we hope to gain an understanding of their day to day challenges of running an agricultural business, how they learn and pass on knowledge and understand the level of technology and web access they have at their disposal. We have already carried out comprehensive research around the specifics of mobile usage in Kenya, popular phones and likely data packages, however, we anticipate finer detail to emerge while we are on the ground. We’ll follow up the sessions with a presentation and demo of the app followed by some recorded usability testing and post use questions to feed into basic quantitative analysis of the prototype.

Week Two

Travelling from Nairobi to Mombasa to spend time at the farmer training centre will allow us to speak to the villagers who benefit the most from the Haller training initiatives. By spending time with the locals, listening and observing them carrying out day to day tasks we aim to get a broader sense of why the app is important and how we can ensure it serves those users properly. We’ll also run some creative workshops to get some direct cultural input in to the visual design of the app. We’ll be bringing with us all the iconography to present at the training centre and to open up for critique and discussion.

Kit List

The prototype (thanks to all the hardwork from Sari, Michel, Joe, Albert and Pearlfisher)
Testing plan, script and questionnaire
Mobile phones (including most popular phones in Kenya)
Laptop
Separate web cam to record app usage
Microphone and camera for usability feedback interviews
Paper and Pens

More updates to come.

Africa road trip: Day Zero

Week One

Week Two

Kit List

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